High & Wide — How it Looked in the Room | March 4 & 5, 2017

After many years of posting our full services online, we had the idea recently to post a simple wide-shot of a full service from each weekend. Even though it’s cool to watch the live broadcast feed, sometimes it’s equally as useful to see how all the elements actually played together in the room.

You may have heard me say before that we serve the room first. This hasn’t changed—when making production, creative, and musical decisions, we make sure the live room is served first, then focus on how it translates to the video broadcast. This may seem elementary to some, but it can be a crucial factor when making a judgment call within the flow of a service.

This weekend was a fairly normal flow for us but we did have an additional segment inside the music set where we went live to our other two campuses. How we made this transition in the room was critical to how the campuses picked up the segment and incorporated it into their flow.

For instance, the way the band held out the ending of song #2 just a hair longer before Whit started speaking was critical to the campuses having a few extra seconds to make their transitions from live to video. Another was our decision to go to video black in the room after Whit finished. This worked well as it gave a nice ending to Whit’s prayer, but it also allowed the campuses a smooth transition point to get back to their live flow.

You may notice other things as well, like how few times we actually do a separate video switch on the center screen. Even though we have the option to do an independent switch on that screen, sometimes it just isn’t required. This weekend we only broke away from the broadcast shots a couple of times. This set just didn’t need it. Next weekend, who knows?

Hopefully this viewpoint can prove helpful as we all strive to make better production and creative decisions within our services—remember that small decisions can have a large impact on an audience. Rock it friends.

Andrew Stone is the Production Manager and Audio Director at Church on the Move in Tulsa, OK. His 27 years of touring experience have brought a unique, and sometimes unorthodox, perspective to his approach towards production in the church. He has been a key part of changing the culture behind COTM's live events and he loves sharing his knowledge with other churches. He's been married for 20 years, rarely wears anything but black, and genuinely loves to rock. You can find him on Twitter (@stone_rocks), Instagram (stone.rocks), and is a blog contributor on Seeds, COTM's free resource site.